On March 18th, Joseph will be teaching a workshop on self-stretching at South Boston Yoga.
The description is below. Please see their workshop page to sign up!
The page lists all workshops in chronological order, so you’ll have to scroll down to the correct date to find the listing.

Are you interested in increasing your flexibility? Do you feel flexible in certain ways but have noticeable limitations in others? Are you interested in learning how to address your individual flexibility challenges?

Join renowned Boston bodywork professional Joseph Welch for a workshop designed to educate you on your body and how it moves. As a group, you will systematically move through different stretches to target individual muscle groups and specific aspects of each muscle within.

This workshop will introduce the applied concepts of AIS (Active Isolated Stretching) and PNF (Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitated Stretching). Using these methods you will highlight the individual needs of your unique body-wide pattern, learn ways to increase the flexibility of specific muscles, advance your asana practice through education, and enhance your posture and movement patterns as a whole.

In this exciting new and more comprehensive format you will learn about the myofascial tissue and its many roles in the body. Participants will see the fascial tissues in context and how they are interdependent with the other body systems.

From there we begin to appreciate how the body incorporates the Anatomy Train Lines to create easy and graceful movement – provided they are in some form of balance and harmony; restriction or weakness in one section can have many knock-on effects elsewhere. This workshop will show you how that happens, how to trace the lines of strain and, most importantly, some strategies to deal with them.

This is the first workshop to combine Anatomy Trains theory alongside structural and functional anatomy and analysis. It blends the concepts of tensegrity with elastic recoil for movement efficiency and illustrates how we use the Anatomy Trains as lines of force transfer.

We will address differential diagnosis to help identify motor control or soft tissue restrictions and where they may be coming from – we will show you the interdependent relationships between many of the tissues and how they interact.

This exciting and fun workshop is delivered with clarity and with your practice in mind – you will have useful and usable skills by the end of the four days.

In the first 2-day section of this workshop we will introduce you to the first four main lines –Superficial Front and Back, Lateral and Spiral. For each of the lines we will teach you a range of movement assessments and you will learn the basics of Fascial Release Technique.

The second section will cover the remaining Anatomy Train lines (Deep Front Line, Arm and Functional Lines) and allow deeper exploration of the main concepts behind the whole system – structural and functional analysis and refining fascial touch skills.

Most people seek treatment when they experience some type of pain. But why something hurts and what that actually means for your body are not well understood. Pain science is an evolving and fascinating field, and we have much to learn.

Just to give an example, there have been numerous studies over the years showing that back pain and positive findings on MRI (“slipped” disks, etc.) are not highly correlated. What does that mean? It means that back pain is not necessarily caused by something that shows up on an MRI, and that many people have bulged disks but no symptoms.

In the article at the following link, Professor Lorimer Moseley gives probably the most readable summation of our current understanding of pain we’ve come across. If you’re curious about why you or someone else may be experiencing pain, especially chronic pain, or why pain sensitivity varies so widely (even within your own body), we highly recommend giving it a read.

The Anatomy Trains concept moves beyond mechanical “cause and affect” actions of muscles to the integrative relational connections of real-life functional movement. This is a revolutionary map for analyzing soft-tissue patterns, and developing strategies for unwinding these patterns via fascial and myofascial work.

Anatomy Trains offers skills that hands-on therapists, regardless of their modality, can use to see their clients more clearly and work more effectively.